Mass Seduction

The Weeknd broadens his erotic thrillers.

His new album is filled with exhaustive—and exhausting—romantic nihilism.

Illustration by Michael Cho; Source: Johnny Nunez / BET / Getty

In 2009, a British television producer named Erika Mitchell began writing fiction inspired by “Twilight.” Initially written under the pseudonym Snowqueens Icedragon, her stories, which she first published on the Web site FanFiction, are erotic thrillers about a sadomasochistic romance between a graduating college student and a powerful businessman. Mitchell wrote them almost like daydream diaries. “I can’t own people’s reaction to the books,” she has said. When the first installment was published, in 2011, with the title “Fifty Shades of Grey,” it quickly became one of the best-selling books in history. Christian Grey, the businessman, became a household name, bringing sexual deviance to the pulp-fiction-reading masses.

The same year, a spiritual ally of Grey’s emerged in the world of R. & B. Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian singer known as the Weeknd, released his first three mixtapes in quick succession: “House of Balloons,” “Thursday,” and “Echoes of Silence.” They explored a world of unrelenting depravity, each night darker and filled with harder drugs than the previous. In this uneasy setting, women are anonymous and love is an alien force with no hope of breaking through the singer’s callousness. Tesfaye, who is now twenty-five, sings almost exclusively in the first and second person and puts the listener in the path of his punishing gaze. “Baby, when I’m finished with you, you won’t want to go outside,” he sings on “Outside.” Tesfaye himself was shadowy at first, declining interviews and avoiding cameras, but his work spoke loudly. Morally bankrupt but artistically pure, the records felt like fully formed erotic thrillers of their own.

Sonically, Tesfaye broke with tradition, too, crafting a bruised, lo-fi style that brushed aside the boilerplate of commercially viable R. & B. while holding on to its strong melodic sensibility. He represented a welcome foil to the reigning male stars of the genre, such as Ne-Yo and Trey Songz, indistinct singers who often succumbed to safe, sterile songwriting. (Other R. & B. stars, like Usher and Chris Brown, tried to distinguish themselves by dabbling in electronic dance music.) Tesfaye took a more deconstructed approach. His mixtapes move slowly but dramatically; they’re filled with extended intros, suspenseful shifts, and ghoulish vocal samples that surface and submerge at crucial moments. Along with artists like Frank Ocean and How to Dress Well, Tesfaye helped create a left-field faction of R. & B. While sonically disparate, collectively this group showed that the genre hadn’t closed its doors to innovation.

Even after signing with a major label, Tesfaye preserved his wicked persona. (To promote the release of his proper début, “Kiss Land,” in 2013, he gave away condoms.) But the qualities that made him such a captivating artist—his lack of remorse, his lurid nighttime adventures, and the black-and-blue fog of sound surrounding them—threatened to prevent him from reaching bigger audiences. When he did appear in the mainstream, it was at the behest of a bigger star, his fellow Toronto native Drake, for whom he did a haunting vocal on a song called “Crew Love,” from 2011. And then, last year, he joined Ariana Grande on her hit “Love Me Harder,” adding a dash of poison to her otherwise saccharine album.

But it was not until Tesfaye scored a spot on the soundtrack for the film adaptation of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which came out in February, that he emerged from the shadows. The pairing reeked of gimmickry, but it was effective. “Earned It,” a creeping ballad filled with dramatic orchestral flourishes, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May. Soon Tom Cruise was lip-synching Tesfaye’s newest single, “Can’t Feel My Face,” on Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show.”

Tesfaye’s new album, “Beauty Behind the Madness,” is his bid for mainstream stardom, and it’s an impressive one. Any attempt at a crossover requires concession, and concession is especially risky for an artist who is so conceptually unyielding. One of the record’s opening lines is “I’ll be the same, never changed for nothing,” and for the most part Tesfaye makes it clear that he has no interest in moral redemption for the sake of success; the record is filled with the sort of exhaustive—and exhausting—nihilism that would make Bret Easton Ellis proud. When Tesfaye coos a line like “I’ma care for you,” it reads as a threat rather than as a reassurance. He is prone to obsessive navel-gazing, as on “Prisoner,” a song that begins airily before descending into almost cartoonish despair. “I’m addicted to a life that’s so empty and cold,” he sings. If “Beauty Behind the Madness” represents a departure from earlier Weeknd records, it is in terms of sound quality: Tesfaye’s cavernous, booming style is rendered in high definition, making for a lavish, expensive-sounding album.

Tesfaye is credited in the writing of all the songs on the record and in the production of most, and where he uses outside help his collaborators often adapt to his style. The Swedish producer Max Martin contributed to three songs, although you might not be able to guess which ones by listening to them. It says a lot—about Tesfaye’s talents, and about the elasticity of pop music right now—that a monolith like Martin is willing to absorb the sound of a formally untested provocateur. Kanye West has a production credit on “Tell Your Friends,” a gentle song that harks back to West’s soul-sampling heyday. Here Tesfaye emerges from his inner turmoil to chest-puff, taking a bird’s-eye view of his own unlikely rise: “Don’t believe the rumors, bitch, I’m still a user / I’m still rocking camo and still roll with shooters,” he sings. “My cousin said I made it big and it’s unusual / She tried to take a selfie at my grandma’s funeral.”

Musicians tend to run from comparisons to other musicians, unless that musician is Michael Jackson. Tesfaye’s voice is eerily similar to the late King of Pop’s—a piercing, high-pitched tenor with an alluring androgyny. Tesfaye is proud of this: in 2011, he released his own version of “Dirty Diana.” Jackson looms large over “Beauty Behind the Madness,” which bridges noirish R. & B. and a full-bodied synth-pop that would sound at home in Quincy Jones’s catalogue. The album is what Jackson might have sounded like had he used music as a tool for channelling perversion rather than for distracting from it. Nostalgia in pop music advances chronologically, of course, and after the lite-disco and funk revival of 2013—Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” is still echoing faintly across the horizon—we now sit squarely in the nineteen-eighties. Tesfaye joins Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen in their successful attempts to refurbish that decade for today’s pop audiences.

If you haven’t finished (or started) the books, you can probably guess how the “Fifty Shades” series winds up for Grey and Steele. Even the coldest men can buckle for the comforts of companionship, and even the most extreme of kinks can become quotidian. On “Beauty Behind the Madness,” Tesfaye tries on a good-guy suit during a few low-stakes moments. He grows sentimental on “Angel,” a melodramatic piano-and-electric-guitar ballad that could have played during the closing credits of an eighties thriller. “Time will tell if we’re meant for this / And if we’re not, I hope you find somebody,” he sings. This is an awkward moment, and not entirely natural for Tesfaye. When he tries to shift his lyrics from XXX to PG-13—“We can sex all night,” he sings, on “As You Are”—he sounds a bit forced. Grey’s transformation happens smoothly. But the path of a pop star cannot hope to resolve itself as tidily as a blockbuster novel does. This year has proved that the world is eager for Tesfaye’s heartless debauchery. What will happen when he grows bored with it? ♦

Carrie Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015, and became a staff writer in 2018.